Charles De Lint - The Ivory and the Horn

I want a shower so bad it hurts, but the night's young and it's still full of monsters. That's what breaks my heart. There are always more monsters.

3

It's cold for a September night, colder still on the rooftop where I crouch, and the wind can find me so easily, but I don't feel the chill.

I used to laugh at the comic books Annie would read, all those impossibly proportioned characters running around in their long underwear, but I don't laugh anymore. The costumes make perfect sense now. My bodysuit has a slick black weave with enough give to let me move freely, but nothing that'll catch on a cornice or in someone's grip. The Thinsulate lining keeps me warm, even below zero. Black gloves, lined hood and runners complete the outfit. Makes me look like one of those B-movie ninjas, but I don't care. It gets the job done.

I draw the line at a cape.

I never read superhero comics when I was a kid— not because they seemed such a guy thing, but because I just couldn't believe in them. I had the same questions for Superman as I did for God: If he was so powerful, why didn't he deal with some real problems? Why didn't he stop wars, feed the starving in Ethiopia, cure cancer? At least God had the Church to do His PR work for Him— if you can buy their reasoning, they have any number of explanations ranging from how the troubles of this life build character to that inarguable catchall, "God's will." And the crap in this life sure makes heaven look good.

When I was growing up, the writers and artists of Superman never even tried to deal with the problem. And since they didn't, I could only see Superman as a monster, not a hero. I couldn't believe his battles with criminals; superpowered geniuses and the like.

I never believed in God either.

If my business wasn't so serious, I'd have to laugh to see myself wearing this getup now, climbing walls like a spider, all my senses heightened; faster, stronger, and more agile than a person has any right to be. It's like— remember the story of Gwion, when he's stirring Cerridwen's potion and it bubbles up and scorches him? He licks off those three drops, and suddenly he can understand the languages of animals and birds, he has all this understanding of the connections that make up the world, and he can change his shape into anything he wants— which proves useful when Cerridwen goes after him.

That's pretty well the way it is for me, except that I can't change my shape. What I've got are the abilities of the totem-heads the anima wore when they came to me. I just wish my fairy godmothers had made me a little smarter while they were at it. Then I wouldn't be in this mess.

I think I've figured out where they came from. I used to work for The Newford Examiner— I guess that makes me more like Superman than the Bat-guy, isn't that another laugh? And I guess I just blew any chance of maintaining a secret identity by revealing that much. Not that it matters. I was always pretty much a loner until I met Annie, and then most of our friends were hers. I liked them all well enough, but without our link with Annie, we've just kind of drifted apart. As for my family, well, they pretty much disowned me when I came out.

So I was working for The Examiner, and before you ask, it's true: We make up most of the stories. Our editor starts with a headline like "Please Adopt My Pig-Faced Son" and the writers take it from there. But sometimes we let other people make it up for us. You wouldn't believe the calls and letters that paper would get.

Anyway, a few months before Annie died, I find myself up in the mountains, interviewing this old hillbilly, woman who claims to have a fairy ring on her property— you know, one of those places where the Little People are supposed to gather for dances at night? I'd brought Annie with me because she wouldn't stay home once I told her where I was going.

The interview goes a little strange— not the strange that's par for the course whenever I've been out in the field interviewing one of our loyal readers with her own take on the wild and the wacky, but strange in how it starts to make sense. Maybe it's because Annie's with me and fairy tales are her bread and butter. I don't know. But the fairy ring is amazing.

It's deep in the woods behind the old lady's trailer, this Disneylike glade surrounded by enormous old trees, with grass that's only growing about an inch high— naturally; I check to see if it's been cut and it hasn't— and the mushrooms. They form a perfect circle in the middle of the glade. These big, fat, umbrella-capped toadstools, creamy colored with blood-red spots on them standing anywhere from a foot to a foot-and-a-half high. The grass inside the mushroom ring is a dark, dark green.

I know, from having read up on them before coming out to do the interview, that fairy rings are due to the growth of certain fungi below the surface. The spawn of the fungi radiates out from the center at a similar rate every year, which is how the ring widens. The darker grass is due to the increased nitrogen produced by the fungus.

None of which explains the feeling I get from the place. Or the toadstools. The last time I saw one like that was when I was still in Brownies— you know the one the owl sits on?

"Do you have to believe in the fairies to see them?" Annie asks.

"Land's sakes, no," Betsy tells her.

She's this beautiful old woman, kind of gangly and pretty thin, but still robust and a real free spirit. I can't believe she's pushing eighty-two.

"They have to believe in you," she explains.

Annie nods like she understands, but the two of them have lost me.

"What do you mean?" I ask.

I'm not even remembering to take notes anymore.

"It's like this," Betsy says. "You don't think of them as prissy little creatures with wings. That's plain wrong. They're earth spirits— and they don't really have shapes of their own; they just show up looking the way we expect them to look. Could be you'll see 'em as your Tinkerbells, or maybe they'll come to you looking like those Japanese robot toys that my grandson likes so much."

"But the fairy ring," I say. "That's just like in the stories..."

"I didn't say the stories were all lies."

"So..." I pause, trying to put it all together— for myself now, never mind the interview. "What is it that you're saying? What do these earth spirits do?"

"They don't do anything. They just are. Mostly they mind their own business, just like we mind ours. But sometimes we catch their attention and that's when you have to be careful."

Annie doesn't say anything.

"Of what?" I ask.

"Of what you're thinking when you're around them. They like to give gifts, but when they do hand 'em out, it's word for word. Sometimes, what you're asking for isn't what you really wants."

At my puzzled look Betsy goes on.

"They give you what you really want," she says. "And that can hurt, let me tell you."

I stand there, the jaded reporter, and I can't help but believe. I find myself wondering what it was that she asked for and what it was that she got.

After a while, Betsy and Annie start back towards the trailer, but I stay behind for a few moments longer, just drinking in the feel of the place. It's so... so innocent. The way the world was when you were a kid, before it turned all crazy-cruel and confusing. Everybody loses their innocence sooner or later; for me and Annie it was sooner.

Standing there, I feel like I'm in the middle of a fairy tale. I forget about what Betsy has just been telling us. I think about lost innocence and just wish that it doesn't have to be that way for kids, you know? That they could be kids for as long as possible before the world sweeps them away.

I think that's why they came to me after Annie died. They mourn that lost innocence, too. They came to me, because with Annie gone, I have no real ties to the world anymore, nothing to hold me down. I guess they just figured that, with their gifts, I'd head out into the world and do what I could to make things right; that I'd make the perfect fairy crusader.